Good Cookbooks?

[Eden]

I see a few of my favorites up above already, but I also really like
A New Way to Cook - Sally Schneider and
Soup, A Way of Life - Barbara Kafka

[GLC1968]

The New American Plate - awesome healthy recipes that are mostly easy to make but taste very complicated!

The Victory Garden Cookbook - old and out of print - but totally worth finding for the amazing resourse! It's all vegetarian and the book is organized by vegetable, so it's a great thing to have if you garden or belong to a CSA where you all of a sudden have a bunch of some veggie that you don't know what to do with...

Any of the South Beach Diet cookbooks. They are chock full of recipes that are healthy and fresh. Every single recipe we've tried has been excellent (dieting or not!).

The Eat Clean Diet Cookbook by Tosca Reno. There are 3 or 4 versions of these books out now. Amazingly creative and delicious food that is natural, unproccessed and void of most sugars and unhealthy fats. Again, every single recipe we've tried from these books has been outstanding.

[indysteel]

The New American Plate - awesome healthy recipes that are mostly easy to make but taste very complicated!

The Victory Garden Cookbook - old and out of print - but totally worth finding for the amazing resourse! It's all vegetarian and the book is organized by vegetable, so it's a great thing to have if you garden or belong to a CSA where you all of a sudden have a bunch of some veggie that you don't know what to do with...

Any of the South Beach Diet cookbooks. They are chock full of recipes that are healthy and fresh. Every single recipe we've tried has been excellent (dieting or not!).

The Eat Clean Diet Cookbook by Tosca Reno. There are 3 or 4 versions of these books out now. Amazingly creative and delicious food that is natural, unproccessed and void of most sugars and unhealthy fats. Again, every single recipe we've tried from these books has been outstanding.

Thanks for the suggetions! I just ordered the New American Plate from Amazon. It sounds like just the ticket for where I wanted to head in terms of cooking.

[Eden]

Oh - and its not exactly a cook book, but the book Timing is Everything by Jack Piccolo is a terrific cooking reference book.

[Crankin]

I use the fast recipes from Cooking Light almost exclusively. At the end of the month I cut them out and save them. I also use a couple of the Cooking Light cookbooks (15 minute meals). I also get Food and Wine and use stuff from that. For the basics I use a Good Housekeeping cookbook I bought for my son when he was in high school, and a couple of Jewish cook books handed down from my mom.
I have a lot of other cookbooks, but most of them are full of recipes that are too fattening, especially the vegetarian ones.

[shootingstar]

Hmmm. Have about 10 cookbooks gathering dust abit. Have one of the Moosewood books while some are a blend of fusion cooking with real cheffy twists, and other books are traditional Asian recipes with photos or illustrations on technique. There are 3, I value because the books are no longer in print but have real value because....China has changed so much in the past decade that some of these photos are probably not quite relevant /scenery has been radically altered.

For past 5 years, I get recipes from magazine websites for:
Cooking Light -healthy recipes (though Eating Well, is even healthier. Cooking Light still tends to use too much sugar.)
Eating Well - healthy recipes
Epicurious.com (which covers Bon Appetite & now-defunct Gourmet magazine)
Saveur

Either he or I, only consult a recipe..um about once per month or less. Rest is memory or we throw ingredients together for culinary magic.

[hoffsquared]

Thanks for all these. Next time I'm at the bookstore, I'll try to find the ones mentioned here.

I use the internet too but I really like to browse through my books at the kitchen table when planning (or at least making an attempt at) out meals for the week.

[Atlas]

Someone already mentioned Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian" and its wonderful. I keep getting it from the library but I really need my own copy.

My other go-to's are "Vegan With a Vengeance" and "Veganomicon" but I understand that most people aren't vegan. Still, they are great cookbooks that have lots of recipes for healthy, good food and many of them don't call for weird ingredients.